The Argosy — page 49: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Letters from Majorca. 39 humoured driver kept us alive by his endeavours to talk intelligibly. Exhilarated by our surroundings, mosquitoes and the night’s dis- turbances were forgotten. The lesser troubles of life, after all, are soon banished. There are indeed some who almost as quickly shake off life’s greater cares. Perhaps they are to be envied, though I don’t think I would choose to be one of them. Yet in many ways they have the best of it as far as this world is concerned, and live the longest. Their motto is “ Away with melancholy,” and some would hold this the truest philosophy. Care, you know, is said to have killed even a cat. At last came low sandhills, with gentle undulations, and a small natural harbour: the end of our drive. Hills separated to admit the water, and give shelter to a few fishing-boats, lying high and dry upon the beach. Between us and them ran the creek or harbour. At our feet sparkled the pure white sand, and over it rolled the green, shallow, wonderfully transparent waters of the Mediterranean. Be- hind us was much grassy land; a heathy common, with lovely blooms and desert spaces, The omnibus came to an anchor. The boy the driver had brought with him was left in charge of the horse, whilst the man went off with us to the caves. They were about two hundred yards away, and a small and not very imposing doorway admitted us. The guide lighted candles, and we explored. The caves, though pretty and worth visiting, are nothing in comparison with those of Arta. They are natural, of course, and are divided into different rooms, after the manner of other caves: each room bearing a name according to the fantastic form it has assumed ; which form lies in imagination as much as in anything else. Most of the rooms were low and arched, but the rock was split and honeycombed into a thousand shapes. Stalactites hung from the roofs of all lengths and of every consistency, fine, delicate and fragile as a needle, or large and hard as a bar of iron, and when struck giving out a musical sound. Fluted columns rose and spread their caps like feathery palms, apparently supporting the roof above them. From the candles, a thousand small lights and flashes were re- flected, and ghostly shadows played at hide-and-seek. Now we descended into shallow depths; now wound round a column into a new compartment and a new scene; now went onwards into what appeared to be the beginning of a journey into the recesses of the earth. The atmosphere was moist and suffocating. It almost seemed that every new turning would open up a Vulcan’s Forge, and Vulcan himself hard at work at his anvil would hardly have surprised us. The foundations of several of the rooms were pools or lakes ot water, black as Erebus, into which we more than once nearly fell headlong, from the darkness and irregularities of our pathway. Would —_a comicbooks.com